Tag: hackday

So.. Mozilla had its first ever Hackday in New York City last Saturday and I had the opportunity of attending it. There were some really good talks which ended with some hacking post lunch. It was an awesome experience getting to meet all the wonderful folks who participated in the hackday and to see their great hacks, and the excellent job by the Mozilla team in running the show.

At the end of the day, I presented an extension that would calculate the Readability scores of text that was selected within the browser. This “Text Readability Scorer” Firefox extension was something that I already had in mind, but which was languishing and waiting to be completed using the latest Addons SDK. The hacking started post lunch and I managed to do complete something that could be presented at the end of the day. While this add-on didnt use any of the cool HTML5(and friends) stuff that was presented earlier that day, I still managed to get a working Extension for Firefox 11 and presented it in the end.

A more complete write-up of the event can be read at the hacks.mozilla.org site, with the extension I presented getting a mention under the “Here come the hacks” section.

Below are a few screenshots of the Readability extension in action, The source code can be found on GitHub.

There is still a lot of work that has to be done, such as calculating the number of syllables more accurately etc. Lets see where this goes, I might be submitting it to the Add-ons’ site once it has some more complete functionality. Thank you for reading!